None of the Above

On Saturday night, the Directors Guild of America granted its award for best feature-film director to Kathryn Bigelow, for “The Hurt Locker,” choosing her over the other four nominees—James Cameron (“Avatar”), Lee Daniels (“Precious”), Jason Reitman (“Up in the Air”), and Quentin Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”). It’s of particular interest because, as the DGA says on its own Web site, “only six times since the DGA Award’s inception in 1948 has the winner not gone on to receive the Academy Award for Best Director.”

Could I just say, “none of the above”? Each of these movies has virtues; none of these movies is especially well-directed. “The Hurt Locker” is an impressive production, certainly a very difficult one to stage in detail; Bigelow’s choice of shots is, by and large, casual and indifferent, except when needlessly arty, but the physical realization of the film, its stage-managing, are very impressive. But there’s no award for best line producer; perhaps there should be. Tarantino directs a dull movie with a message-mongering script; the latter is what’s worth discussing. “Up in the Air” has one directorial coup, the inclusion of documentary interviews with unemployed people. Lee Daniels, with “Precious,” does the best—he elicits impressive performances from actors who were less than stars and dares to seek visual correlates for his main characters’ inner life, but his images are hardly anything to think about. Of the five nominees, Cameron is the only one who chose each shot as if it mattered; the results are neither subtle nor precise, and they depend on a generic schema of action editing, but they’re certainly personal.

This brings up the question of what directors do, and how to evaluate their work. It clearly differs from film to film (and, for that matter, from director to director—often, for instance, movies in the thirties had a dialogue director who got a small credit). But my first, though not my sole, criterion for seeing what a director does is the picture-making—the sense, from the first images, that something from within the filmmaker, beyond representation, is being created, and the sense of that creation being conveyed as an experience. None of these five movies does this.

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